Gender, Governance and Traditional Medicine: Women’s Roles in Natural Resource Based Healthcare

Abstract

Traditional medicine connects natural resources with culturally rooted knowledge and everyday healthcare, and in most cases women function as healers, caregivers, users of medicinal plants, cultivators, and keepers of ethnobotanical knowledge. This review looks at the role of women in traditional medicine and in healthcare based on natural resources from the standpoint of gender and governance. A structured literature review was carried out using a dataset of 196 records that were published between 2015 and 2026. After selecting only those studies that dealt substantially with women or gender, traditional medicine or medicinal natural resources, and aspects of governance, 33 studies were retained for thematic analysis. Five closely related themes came to light: women as healers, caregivers and keepers of knowledge; gendered governance and the unequal recognition they receive from institutions; the intergenerational transmission and continuity of knowledge; access to medicinal resources and environmental sustainability; and the contributions of women to community, maternal and reproductive healthcare. In all the different settings, women's medicinal knowledge is incorporated into daily care, social networks and ecological relationships, although formal authority and control over resources tend to be gendered. The review concludes that in order to maintain healthcare based on natural resources it is necessary to have gender-responsive governance, to ensure meaningful participation by women who hold this knowledge, to protect traditional knowledge, to guarantee access to medicinal resources and to establish evidence-based relationships between traditional and biomedical healthcare.